


the going of an inland soul to sea

by forochel



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-12
Updated: 2010-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-02 23:07:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/374380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forochel/pseuds/forochel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an iteration on dom cobb's existence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the going of an inland soul to sea

Dominic Cobb at an hour old is a squalling, red thing all swathed in duck-yellow towels and the love and adoration of his parents. His eyes are screwed shut with the force of his cries, but when he opens them they are the clear blue of the Cornish seas.

 

 

At a year old, Dominic Cobb is cherubic and good-natured. He waddles after the mountain that is his father across their garden. Folds of baby fat cushion his falls, and his round cheeks dimple when he laughs.

 

 

Dominic Cobb’s father is a visiting professor of architecture at a distinguished American university. Having married Dominic’s mother and produced Dominic in three years, perhaps the term “visiting professor” is somewhat fallacious. Dominic grows up cradled in the interplay of his parents’ trans-Atlantic accents, and is given the scraps from his father’s work-desk to colour with.

 

 

Dominic’s four when his father sees that he has copied, imperfectly, a sketch of a hypaethral. The details on the columns are smudged and the picture in general looks like it has been swallowed whole by a psychedelic rainbow monster and shat out in technicolour, but there is a certain talent there. In the same year, the US Armed Forces start experimenting with the beginnings of an idea.

 

 

The building blocks provide hours of entertainment for little Dominic; a reprieve for his mother, who busies herself writing for the papers. Otherwise he gets underfoot, quite literally, and distracts her with tall tales of what happened in the garden the other day and the flying giraffe that landed on the Longs’ roof the other day. Dominic is six, and in kindergarten he prints these stories out on paper, in a neat, rounded hand that will evolve over time into a slanted, spiky script.

 

 

Dominic comes home from his first day of school with a new name and scrapes all along his right calf.

“Dominic!” his mother exclaims with horror at the grass stains on his trousers.

“Dom,” he reports solemnly. “I am now Dom.”

“If you must,” Mother says distractedly, “Though it would be nice if you were also more careful.”

Father is genially amused, and after dinner he beckons to Dom in a long-established ritual.

“Would you like to look at my drawings, Dom?” he asks, using Dom’s new name.

“Yes, please,” Dom says with a grin.

Father picks him up and they go into his study, with the big oak table all strewn with papers and drawings and little models, and Father shows him his work, with all the lines and curves that become houses and buildings in places Dom has never been to before. It’s all very fascinating, and sometimes Dom gets to put things right in Father’s drawings.

 

 

It is on a similarly grass-stained Thursday that Dom’s world shakes apart for the first time. He is thirteen, and his parents are having a divorce. Perhaps it is the removal of his mother to the other side of the States that allows the seeds of Dom’s future to be sown. But on this afternoon Dom walks past his parents in his muddy football kit and trails grass and soil all over the carpet. They are sitting anxiously at the table he has spent his childhood drawing on, and he walks past them in silence. There is silence without and within. Dom goes up to his room, showers, and tucks himself into bed. He falls asleep with the humming of the radiator in his ears.

 

 

His dreams are vivid and bad; Dom’s sleep is troubled and restless for a very long time after that.

 

 

Two years pass like that and Dom is constantly lethargic for lack of proper sleep. His father has grown sad and solemn; his shoulders have sloped inwards as he withdraws into his work. Perhaps Dom ought to have followed his mother as she travelled around the world on her journalistic exploits. As it is, one day Dom drags himself through the door to find his father sitting at the table (it is a new one; glass-topped, very new-fangled) with a strange man in a very sharp suit. A metal suitcase lies on the table between them.

“Dad?”

“Dom,” his father says, lifting an eyebrow. “This is Charles. He ... has something that may help you with your ... problems at night.”

Dom feels his lips quirk before he can wipe his face of any expression. Charles’s lips quirk right back at him.

“He’s military, dad.” Dom points out. His father has not, in the recent years, expressed favourable opinions towards the armed forces.

“Yes. I will of course be the one instructing you in the use of this.” His father raps the suitcase with his knuckles.

“Why’s _he_ here, then?”

“This is not exactly for public consumption -”

“There is a cost, of course.” Charles interrupts. His dark eyes are piercing. “But we have reason to believe that this will be mutually beneficial.”

 

 

So at fifteen Dominic Cobb starts his training in the ways of the dreamscape. He does not play on a pitch any longer, and where his cleats and kit were stored in his wardrobe now stands the shiny suitcase. Dom’s father teaches him to train his subconscious; he explores it with him and ferrets out the reason for Dom’s insomnia. That is the first time Dom’s subconscious kills his father (it was the goalkeeper, with a particularly vicious cleat). Dom surfaces from the kick gasping with tears.

“I’m sorry,” his father says.

“It isn’t your fault,” his father says next.

“Don’t get used to death,” his father says last, and leaves after giving him a protracted hug.

 

 

On Dom’s sixteenth birthday they enter his father’s subconscious, and Dom’s father shows him how to build. The joy of it - of shaping never-ending stairways and looping mountain ranges back into themselves; of seeing projections vanish in walls and walk out again of the windows of a bakery down the street - fills Dom and he whoops with laughter. The sound of his jubilation echoes strangely in the mountains he has built around the town they are in. They are under for only five minutes, but it is one of the best hours of Dom’s life. The happiness buoys Dom along school that day, and it trebles when the pretty, French exchange student kisses him after a rehearsal for the school play.

 

 

When Dom graduates from high school his father has taught him more about architecture both in reality and in the Dreaming than Dom can care to learn again in university. The military takes Dom away to a base and teaches them to navigate and cheat minds that are not his own or his father’s. He is their guinea pig in this new form of warfare, and his father watches anxiously as they test Dom. This is where Dom learns to load, unload, take apart, put together, shoot and care for every firearm that he may want to use in a dream. Those who know of this dream technology still, at this point, labour under the delusion that one must know to great specificity the reality to recreate and use an item in dreams.

 

 

Dom is twenty and working as an extractor for the government of the United States of America. He aids in the training of the first batch of soldiers to undergo combat training in a shared dream. There is no need, as of yet, to militarise their minds. He also teaches kids who are like Dom had been. Something like a therapist. He is a different therapist for each of them. He learns to forge from them.

 

 

Someone, an insider, almost manages to extract state secrets from the Chief-of-Staff one day. Soldiers can’t dream any more, and the addiction, the blurring of reality and dreams affects their combat effectiveness.The proliferation of extraction spreads like a virus, a global pandemic - nothing is safe or secure, and no one wants to be militarised; extractors are not to be trusted. Governments world-wide outlaw PASIVs and Somnacin. Five months before any of this, though, an eleven-year-old boy by the name of Arthur meets Dom in a sterile corridor and says “I know you”, dark eyes narrow and intelligent. Dom smiles at him and says, “Do you now?” to hide the sudden hammering of his heart. They do not meet again until Arthur is eighteen. This does not matter right now, as Dominic Cobb is twenty-one and without any avenues of legal employment.

 

 

He follows his father across the Atlantic to Paris and enrols in a course in Art and Architecture. His father has tenure there and pulls strings for Dom. Dom meets the pretty exchange student from high school in the student lounge - she is as enchanting as ever, and also enormously clever and his father’s prize student. There could be something to be said about nepotism here, but she is studying for her masters, and Dom is but a bachelor’s student. Mal also owns a PASIV, which Dom discovers a few months into their rekindled friendship. Going under with her is horribly intimate, heady, and almost better than sex.

 

 

Mal has friends, and they set Dom up on little jobs. These jobs supplement his allowance, and they grow bigger til Dom pays his father back in full. His father gives him worried looks over dinner from time to time; he is not a foolish man at all, but he, having been at the inception of the PASIV, understands all too well, perhaps, the addictive rush of going under and manipulating the dreamscape. The extraction he wants nothing to do with, so Dom keeps the conversation away from his work and steers it towards the more mundane architecture of reality, the fortunes of his father’s football club back in England, the ridiculous things that his mother keeps on getting up to with the Los Angeles Times.

 

 

Dom Cobb at twenty-five years old has had a decade’s worth of experience with the workings of the subconscious. Armed with a largely decorative degree, a fully functional PASIV, a global set of connections from before the Ban, and more importantly Mal, Dom is well on his way to world domination. He is carving his reputation into the fragments of half-remembered dreams, in the extraction industry. He can only go deeper, from here.

**Author's Note:**

> (wrote this the night of watching the movie — I know now that Miles is Mal's dad, but at the time the chinese subtitles on during the movie confused me, so I'm just leaving the mistake as is.)


End file.
